I'm using gccemcs under WSL2 and trying to switch from mu4e to notmuch. 

One thing I immediately like about notmuch is that it's much more faster than mu4e. 

But I also almost immediately ran into some issues. The one that bothers me the most is, 

when I hit ENTER to open a long thread from notmuch-search mode, it takes a very long time to load. 

Sometimes, this can take 30 seconds or more. My understanding is that notmuch needs to load all the messages 

(in my case, I tried threads with 20+ messages), and the default shr renderer is not great at dealing with large amount of data.  

After some research, I found that setting mm-text-html-renderer to links would reduce the load time from <a long time> 

to around 2 seconds or less. But one small issue with this is some characters are not displayed correctly, for example the 

RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, which would be displayed as \342\200\231 

A bit more research lead me to the toggle-enable-multibyte-characters function, I found that if I invoke this function

twice interactively, the display would be fixed. 

I guess my question is, how do I make notmuch-show display characters like  RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK correctly 

when I use links as html renderer? And why would invoking   toggle-enable-multibyte-characters fix the issue?